Death Du Jour (5 page)

I looked behind me, down the drive. Across the road sat a similar chalet, this one trimmed in red and blue. A man and woman stood in front, arms folded, mittened hands tucked under armpits. They watched silently, squinting into the morning glare, their faces grim below identical orange hunting caps. The neighbors who had reported the fire. I scanned the road. There were no other homes within visual distance. Whoever thought she had heard muffled booms must have good ears.

LaManche and I started toward the house. We passed dozens of firefighters, colorful in their yellow suits, red hard hats, blue utility belts, and black rubber boots. Some wore oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. Most seemed to be gathering equipment.

We approached a uniformed officer standing by the porch. Like the driveway guard, he was Sûreté du Québec, probably from a post in St-Jovite or a nearby town. The SQ, or Quebec Provincial Police, have jurisdiction everywhere off the island of Montreal, except in towns that maintain their own police. St-Jovite would be too small for that, so the SQ had been called, maybe by the fire chief, maybe by the neighbor. They, in turn, had called the arson investigators from our lab. Section d’Incendie et Explosif. I wondered who had made the decision to call the coroner. How many victims would we find? In what condition would they be? Not good, I was sure. My heart stepped up its tempo.

Again LaManche held up his badge, and the man inspected it.

“
Un instant, Docteur, s’il vous plaît,
” he said, holding up a gloved palm. He called to one of the firefighters, said something, and pointed at his head. In seconds we had hard hats and masks. We put on the former, hung the latter over our arms.

“
Attention!
” said the officer, inclining his head toward the house. Then he stepped aside to let us pass. Oh yes. I’d be careful.

The front door was wide open. When we crossed the threshold out of the sunshine the temperature dropped twenty degrees. The air inside felt damp and smelled of charred wood and soggy plaster and fabric. A dark goo covered every surface.

Straight ahead a staircase rose to a second story, to the left and right gaped what must have been the living and dining rooms. What remained of the kitchen was in back.

I’d been to other fire scenes, but few as devastated as this. Charred boards lay everywhere, like debris hurled
against a seawall. They crisscrossed on top of tangled chair and sofa frames, angled against stairs, and trellised against walls and doors. Remnants of household furnishings lay in blackened heaps. Wires dangled from walls and ceilings, and pipes twisted inward from their points of attachment. Window frames, stair rails, boards, everything was edged in black icicle lace.

The house was crawling with people in hard hats, talking, taking measurements, photos, and videos, collecting evidence, and scribbling on clipboards. I recognized two arson investigators from our lab. They held a measuring tape between them and one squatted at a fixed point while the other circled, recording data every few feet.

LaManche spotted a member of the coroner’s staff, and began picking his way forward. I followed, snaking between twisted metal shelving, broken glass, and what looked like a tangled red sleeping bag, its stuffing spewed like charcoal innards.

The coroner was very fat and very flushed. He straightened slightly when he saw us, blew a puff of air, pooched out his lower lip, and gestured an upturned mitten at the devastation around us.

“So, Monsieur Hubert, there are two dead?”

LaManche and Hubert were design opposites, like contrasting shades on a color wheel. The pathologist was tall and rangy, with a long, bloodhound face. The coroner was round in every way. I thought of Hubert in horizontals, LaManche in verticals.

Hubert nodded, and three chins rippled above his muffler. “Upstairs.”

“Others?”

“Not yet, but they haven’t finished in the lower level. The fire was much more intense in the back. They
think it probably started in a room off the kitchen. That area burned completely, and the floor collapsed into the basement.”

“Have you seen the bodies?”

“Not yet. I’m waiting for clearance to go upstairs. The fire chief wants to be sure it’s safe.”

I shared the chief’s sentiment.

We stood in silence, surveying the mess. Time passed. I curled and uncurled my fingers and toes, trying to keep them flexible. Eventually three firemen descended. They wore hard hats and goggle masks, and looked as if they’d been rummaging for chemical weapons.

“It’s O.K.,” said the last fireman, unsnapping and removing his mask. “You can go up now. Just watch your step and keep the hard hats on. That whole damn ceiling could come down. But the floors look O.K.” He continued toward the door, then turned back. “They’re in the room on the left.”

Hubert, LaManche, and I worked our way up the stairs, shards of glass and charred rubble crunching under our feet. Already my stomach was tightening and a hollow feeling was building in my chest. Though it is my business, I have never grown immune to the sight of violent death.

At the top a door opened to the left, another to the right, there was a bath straight ahead. Though badly smoke damaged, compared with the downstairs, things seemed to be reasonably intact at this level.

Through the left doorway I could see a chair, a bookcase, and the end of a twin bed. On it was a pair of legs. LaManche and I entered the left-hand room, Hubert went to check the one on the right.

The back wall was partially burned, and at places two-by-fours were exposed behind the flowered wallpaper.
The beams were charcoal black, their surfaces rough and checked, like the skin on a croc. “Alligatored,” the arson boys would write. Charred and frozen debris lay underfoot, and soot covered everything.

LaManche took a long look around, then pulled a tiny Dictaphone from his pocket. He recorded the date, time, and location, and began describing the victims.

The bodies lay on twin beds that formed an L in the far corner of the room, a small table between them. Strangely, both individuals appeared to be fully clothed, though smoke and charring had obscured all indicators of style or gender. The victim along the back wall wore sneakers, the one on the side had died in stocking feet. I noticed that one athletic sock was partly off, exposing a smoke-stained ankle. The tip of the sock hung limply over the toes. Both victims were adult. One appeared more robust than the other.

“Victim number one . . .” continued LaManche.

I forced myself to take a closer look. Victim number one held its forearms high, flexed as if ready to fight. Pugilistic pose. While not long enough or hot enough to consume all the flesh, the fire that raced up the back wall had produced sufficient heat to cook the upper limbs and cause the muscles to contract. Below the elbows the arms were stick-thin. Clumps of scorched tissue clustered along the bones. The hands were blackened stumps.

The face reminded me of Rameses’ mummy. The lips had burned away, exposing teeth with dark and cracked enamel. One incisor was delicately outlined in gold. The nose was burned and squashed, the nostrils pointing upward like the snout of a fruit bat. I could see individual muscle fibers circling the orbits and streaming across
the cheekbones and mandible, like a line drawing in an anatomy text. Each socket held a dried and shriveled eyeball. The hair was gone. So was the top of the head.

Victim number two, though equally dead, was more intact. Some of the skin was blackened and split, but in most places it was merely smoked. Tiny white lines radiated from the corners of the eyes, and the ears were pale on the insides and underneath the lobes. The hair had been reduced to a frizzled cap. One arm lay flat, the other was flung wide, as if reaching for its partner in death. The outstretched hand had been reduced to a bony, blackened claw.

LaManche’s somber monotone droned on, describing the room and its lifeless occupants. I half listened, relieved that I wouldn’t be needed. Or would I? There were supposed to be kids. Where were they? Through the open window I could see sunshine, pine trees, and glistening white snow. Outside, life went on.

Silence interrupted my thoughts. LaManche had stopped dictating and replaced wool gloves with latex. He began to examine victim number two, lifting the eyelids and observing the inside of the nose and mouth. Then he rolled the body toward the wall and raised the shirttail.

The outer layer of skin had split and the edges were curling back. The peeling epidermis looked translucent, like the delicate film inside an egg. Underneath, the tissue was bright red, mottled white where it had lain in contact with the crumpled sheets. LaManche pressed a gloved finger into the back muscle and a white spot appeared in the scarlet flesh.

Hubert rejoined us as LaManche was returning the body to its supine position. We both looked a question at him.

“Empty.”

LaManche and I did not change expression.

“There are a couple of cribs in there. Must be the kids’ room. Neighbors say there were two babies.” He was breathing hard. “Twin boys. They’re not in there.”

Hubert took out a hankie and wiped his chapped face. Sweat and arctic air are not a good combination. “Anything here?”

“Of course this will require a full autopsy,” answered LaManche in his melancholy bass. “But based on my preliminary, I would say that these people were alive when the fire broke out. At least this one was.”

He indicated body number two.

“I’ll be here another thirty minutes or so, then you may remove them.”

Hubert nodded and left to tell his transport team.

LaManche crossed to the first body, then returned to the second. I watched in silence, breathing warmth onto my mittened fingers. Finally, he finished. I didn’t have to ask.

“Smoke,” he said. “Around the nostrils, in the nose and air passages.” He looked at me.

“They were still breathing during the fire.”

“Yes. Anything else?”

“The lividity. The cherry red color. That suggests carbon monoxide in the blood.”

“And . . . ?”

“The blanching when you applied pressure. Livor isn’t fixed yet. Blanching only occurs for a matter of hours after lividity first develops.”

“Yes.” He looked at his watch. “It’s just past eight now. This one could have been alive as late as three or four
A.M.
” He pulled off the latex gloves. “
Could
have been, but the fire brigade got here at two-thirty, so
death was before that. Livor is extremely variable. What else?”

The question went unanswered. We heard commotion below, then feet pounded up the stairs. A fireman appeared in the doorway, flushed and breathing hard.

“
Estidecolistabernac!
”

I ran through my québécois lexicon. Not there. I looked at LaManche. Before he could translate the man went on.

“Someone here named Brennan?” he asked LaManche.

The hollow feeling spread to my innards.

“We’ve got a body in the basement. They say we’re going to need this Brennan guy.”

“I’m Tempe Brennan.”

He looked at me for a long time, helmet under one arm, head tipped. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and looked back at LaManche.

“You can go down there as soon as the chief clears you through. And better bring a spoon. There’s not much left of this one.”

T
HE VOLUNTEER FIREMAN LED US DOWN THE STAIRS
and into the back of the house. Here, most of the roof was gone and sunlight poured into the gloomy interior. Particles of soot and dust danced on the wintry air.

We stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. On the left I could make out the remains of a counter, sink, and several large appliances. The dishwasher was open, its contents black and melted. Charred boards lay everywhere, the same giant pickup sticks I’d seen in the front rooms.

“Keep back by the walls,” said the fireman, gesturing with his arm as he disappeared around the doorjamb.

He reappeared seconds later, working his way along the west side of the room. Behind him, the countertop curled upward like a giant licorice twist. Embedded in it were fragments of shattered wine bottles and unidentifiable globs of various sizes.

LaManche and I followed, sliding along the front wall, then rounding the corner and moving down the counter. We stayed as far from the center of the room as possible, picking our way through burned rubble, imploded metal containers, and scorched propane tanks.

I stopped next to the fireman, back to the counter,
and surveyed the damage. The kitchen and an adjacent room were incinerated. The ceilings were gone, the separating wall reduced to a few charred timbers. What had been the floor was now a yawning black hole. An extension ladder angled from it in our direction. Through the opening I could see men in hard hats lifting debris and either flinging or carrying it out of sight.

“There is a body down there,” said my guide, tipping his head at the opening. “Found it when we began to clear rubble from the floor collapse.”

“Just one, or more?” I asked.

“Hell if I know. It doesn’t hardly look human.”